Prints & Objects

Venice Walk

This series of six stills were taken from an hour long video, shot by Julia Defferary as she followed me walking through Venice one evening in June 2000. The camera stays on my feet, pursuing me throughout.

The images are mounted and hung on the wall as a series

Size each still 12 x 8 “

Pretty Fly

This little video piece sits in a very small cupboard, hung on a wall. The video is looped and the sound track is a child’s song (from the movie ‘Night of the Hunter’). It was shot on location in Death Valley Junction (location of the movie ‘Lost Highway’), next to the haunted motel. The figure multiplies and drifts in and out of the image as the dust and smoke engulf her.

The project ‘Still’ is a series of six colour photographic prints, each 1 x 1 metres. It depicts six very different performances remade for the camera. The images are unframed and hung using clips. The arrangement of the images around the space is flexible, subject to the demands of the venue.

Based on performances drawn from my body of work, the images recreate the image of the performance but in a different context. The pictures are not documentation, rather they are new images staged specifically for the camera, for the blink of the shutter. When I make a work, I start with an image. Sometimes that image is realised as a performance, or as a film, an object or even through sound or words. I recreate that imagined image through the work. The images in ‘Still’ are a response to the tension between two ideas: that one single image can represent an entire performance or that a performance can encapsulate a single image. I attempt to inhabit the image and in doing so I deliberately set up a confrontation between the performed action and the stilled moment. Then the photographer directs and decides when to press the shutter.

The photographs are a collaboration between performance artist Anita Ponton and photographer Flip Wibbly Jelly